Frugal Paradigm Completion

Abstract

Lexica distinguishing all morphologically related forms of each lexeme are crucial to many language technologies, yet building them is expensive. We propose Frugal Paradigm Completion, an approach that predicts all related forms in a morphological paradigm from as few manually provided forms as possible. It induces typological information during training which it uses to determine the best sources at test time. We evaluate our language-agnostic approach on 7 diverse languages. Compared to popular alternative approaches, our Frugal Paradigm Completion approach reduces manual labor by 16-63% and is the most robust to typological variation. * This work was carried out during the first author's internship at Google UK in 2019.

What transfers in morphological inflection? Experiments with analogical models

“…First, although the Sig-Morphon 2020 datasets are balanced by paradigm cell, real datasets are Zipfian, with sparse coverage of cells (Blevins et al, 2017;Lignos and Yang, 2018). For languages with large paradigms, the model thus requires the capacity to fill cells for which no exemplar can be retrieved, perhaps using a variant of adaptive source selection (Erdmann et al, 2020;Kann et al, 2017a). Second, the similar-exemplar model performs better in one-shot transfer experiments, but is hampered in the su- Finally, since the memory-based architecture is cognitively inspired, it might be adapted as a cognitive model of language learning in contact situations.…”